As Iran watches Korea

For Israel, South Korea is the model we must strenuously avoid emulating.

The North Korean attack last week on South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island included
elements all too familiar to Israelis. But the horrified global reaction was of
a very different order.

On the face of it, what happened between the
Koreas greatly resembled what we here have experienced almost routinely at times
– out-of-the-blue, unprovoked shelling of civilians by apparently inscrutable
and fanatical enemy forces.

Israelis – North and South – have found
themselves targeted by rockets, mortars and sniper fire so frequently that we’ve
learned to take such incidents almost in our stride. So has the rest of the
world. Often Kassams, Grads and other assorted projectiles lobbed into Israel
from Gaza and Lebanon fail to get so much as a mention in foreign news
outlets.

The Korean confrontation, however, appeared to shake the world,
to the extent of triggering a downward slide in leading stock markets.
Governments outdid each other in censuring Pyongyang’s aggression. In our case,
the widespread reaction is to generally downplay Arab aggression, fault the
victim (Israel) and warn Israel not to retaliate.

This double standard is
particularly unfortunate given the similarities of the two situations. Both
South Korea and Israel face implacable enemies with tyrannical regimes,
ostensibly impervious to Western reasoning and not readily predictable. In both
instances the danger of nuclear weapons looms large.

JUST BEFORE last
week’s onslaught, North Korea showed off 2,000 uranium-enrichment centrifuges
and the initial construction of a 100-megawatt light-water reactor to visiting
American scientists. Concomitantly, Israel is menaced by Iranian efforts to
amass nuclear prowess.

Indeed, North Korea reportedly exports nuclear
knowhow and ballistic missile technology to both Iran and Syria. The Syrian
reactor destroyed by Israel in 2007 was constructed according to North Korean
blueprints.

Pyongyang’s finger stirs many a Mideastern plot.

Both
North Korea and its Mideastern associates are testing the limits of world
tolerance, attempting to gauge how far they can go with impunity. It’s no
stretch to suggest that Teheran and Damascus carefully monitor every nuance of
Washington’s response to Pyongyang’s actions.

They must have derived
satisfaction following Pyongyang’s boasting about its expanded nuclear program,
when US special envoy for North Korea Stephen Bosworth declared that “This is
not a crisis.”

It needs be remembered that despite heavy sanctions, the
number and scale of North Korean provocations has only increased of late. North
Korea tests nuclear devices and ballistic missiles, and last March one of its
submarines sank a South Korean naval vessel.

North Korea is Iran’s role
model for bamboozling the US and getting away with it. Yet Washington, merely
sending an aircraft carrier into the area, looks set to let Kim Jong Il continue
to get away with quite a bit, as long as he doesn’t overly embarrass it with
barefaced gamechanging.

The Obama administration has ways of underscoring
unmistakably vigorous messages both to Pyongyang and to Teheran. A feeble
American reply in East Asia would dangerously embolden West Asia’s
ayatollahs.

If Kim can thumb his nose at Obama, so can Ahmadinejad. And
Ahmadinejad is watching attentively.

In fact, most analysts agree that,
for all his bravado, Kim is less likely to cross the Rubicon and instigate war
than are rogue Islamic regimes vowing to erase Israel off the map. Nuclear
weapons in Iranian hands would make this an exceedingly more insecure world than
do such weapons in North Korean possession.

This is America’s foremost
challenge – even if, disconcertingly, it sometimes sounds as though the greatest
danger to world peace stems from apartment construction in some east Jerusalem
Jewish neighborhoods.

FOR ISRAEL, South Korea is the model we must
strenuously avoid emulating. South Korea is a blackmailed nation, compelled to
take it on the chin from its northern sister lest it inflame a dreadful –
perhaps nuclear – confrontation.

Israel cannot afford a nuclear Iran,
which would change the regional balance of power at a stroke, embolden Teheran
to pursue its expansionist ambitions and impose South Korean-style constraints
upon our self-defense. We can tolerate constraints immeasurably less than Seoul,
whose population isn’t threatened with outright physical
annihilation.

Winning the face-off against Iran requires intensified
US-led international sanctions, backed by a credible threat of military action;
the more credible that threat, the less likely it would have to be realized.
Similar US-led resolution in the case of North Korea would send an important
signal to Iran.

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